Medical Marijuana Reduces Opioid Overdoses in Some States Over a ten year period, states that legalized medical marijuana showed a 24% reduction in opioid overdose deaths. I’m not sure any other measure has ever proven this effective in reducing the fatalities from these drugs. Although the mechanism causing this has yet to be elucidated, it…

Investigating patient expectations and treatment outcome in a chronic low back pain population This article, while using a sample size of 47 patients, set out using the patient-centered outcomes questionnaire (PCOQ) to determine the outcomes that patients consider to be clinically meaningful across four treatment domains – pain, fatigue, emotional distress, and level of interference….

“Long-term opioid treatment of chronic nonmalignant pain: unproven efficacy and neglected safety?” The title of this article really says it all. The authors performed a well-designed meta-analysis of all available literature over the past 30 years relating to efficacy of this drug class for time periods greater than 3 or 6 months. Of the more…

The article “Advancing Telecare for Pain Treatment in Primary Care” provides an excellent example of how engaging the patient can provide tremendous returns related to patient health outcome and improved economics related to opioid prescribing. For less than 5 hours per year, clinical outreach protocols addressing the various comorbidities associated with opioid prescribing yielded some very promising…